a nice cup of tea

Funny how drinks can taste so different according to where you are and what you are drinking them out of.
The cup of tea below was partaken of in a small roadside bar about half an hour from home after an incredibly long journey on many small back roads.
It was only Yellow Label - the tea you dig out when all other tea possibilities have been exhausted, BUT, after a six hour drive, and drunk out of a wonderfully chunky hotel-ware cup, with lorries zipping past it was pure heaven.
I would have done the boring motorway route from Bordeaux after re-installing the lad (see last post) back into his art school life and flat, but as part of the back bumper seemed to be flapping off the car, and, being a story-inventing type person, I could see the thing finally detaching itself to crunch into someone's windscreen - not good. So, after a brief look at a massive scale map, and as usual, not gauging distances, I set off across country and got lost, and re-realised how long driving on small roads does take, especially as French road speeds how now been dropped to 80 from 90 kms per hour.

Still, I saw many wonderful things such as a newly planted forest, unsung and beautiful village churches, llamas, donkeys, distant vistas of the pyrenees, a man walking a pig on a lead, Toulouse-brick pigeon houses, newly ploughed undulating fields, wind-ruffled lakes, and all the different architecture of each region I passed through, rather than three lanes of traffic and the occasional road bridge.
Also, I avoided all dismal motorway service places and stopped in a small grey stone town called Lectore I had visited on the lad-dropping off trip last year. It seemed the same, and I did pretty much the same thing - had a drink and wrote him a letter - something we forget to do back at home when normal life encroaches.
So, despite a sore-ish back, I'm glad I took the longer, slower route. It gave me time to reflect on the happy summer time we spent with the lad, our respective projects to be started in this new phase of the year, appreciation of the landscape I was passing though, and the realisation of just how good a cup of tea really can taste.

Tea - a constant in life

For me anyway, and I suspect for thousands (millions?) of other English bods.

This morning, I was beyond dismayed to discover there was NO tea left. I knew this point had been approaching but was unaware of quite how soon . . .
You can buy tea in France; it mainly comes in yellow boxes, marked, not surprisingly 'Yellow Label' and you can order it cafés where it is generally served thus: tea bag placed next to a cup of almost hot water, with, if you have asked for milk, a small jug of boiling milk. Occasionally you may have the luck to be presented with the bag IN a teapot containing very hot water, in which case you're heading vaguely in the right direction of 'a nice cup of tea.'
A Nice Cup Of Tea.
Oh, those words . . . how many times have I heard them spoken in so many different situations.
A stressful day - kettle on, 'let's have a N. C. O. T'. Just about any police drama where someone is being conveyed bad news - 'would you like a cup of tea, dear?' Visiting friends, visiting strangers, someone's come to fix your sink, - would you like a . . .  standing on a windswept, damp train platform, trapped in an endless meeting or weeping into a sandwich at a funeral wake; if tea is available everything somehow seems bearable.
Tea is an addiction; one that started for me at around the age of twelve. I can recall the sound of the kettle being put on the ancient green enamel stove we had in the flat; the weedy whistle and the occasional swearing if my mother had forgotten and had come back to a white hot, boiled dry vessel.
Tea has accompanied me through life in its various forms, from builder's creosote in London Cafés through to occasional indulgences in Fortnum and Mason's and other hallowed tea emporiums.
The apex cup must have been in a National Trust Tearoom in Corfe Castle, Dorset: white cup, accompanying scones, clotted cream, strawberry jam, log fire and slanting rain outside.
So, back to our dog and onion-smelling kitchen; no tea, other than Lapsang - I like this but it doesn't fill the N.C.O.T desire. I might have to go and buy a box of yellow label . . .

                            Our tea canister (sadly empty) and Butlin's caddy spoon, circa 1948

                             A link to a great site all about a nice cup of tea and a sit down

Our day out in Bram

Last saturday dawned manky and damp. I would like to have been about to explore the streets of Miami or Valetta perhaps but instead we were going to have a trip out to wander around the train station at Bram. Ezra's choice, and to be fair, quite a good deal really: half an hours worth of petrol, some sketching and a cup of tea if we could find a café.
I refused his first plea for a mooch around the station at Castelnaudary (see previous posts) as it was further and we'd only just been there.
So, for anyone looking at this blog who is under the happy impression that the South of France is all espadrilles, lavender and dawn to dusk sunshine, here is the reality . . . February in the middle of a windy plain somewhere between Toulouse and Carcassonne.

The old fire station of Bram (Centre de secours = centre of HELP) not sure where the new one is, or if they have one?
Thinking someone was attacking a Citroen DS with a broom, I was about to go and ask if we could have it (car, not the broom) but then realised it was just a way of holding the bonnet up.



                               

A rather moving, and uncared for, monument near the train station, stating that it was here that 159 Jews (of which, 21 were children) who were resident in the Aude department, were taken in a raid, by order of the Vichy government and delivered to the Nazis. They were sent from Bram station towards the extermination camp at Auschwitz.

While I was standing in probably a rather stupid place, a memory slipped into my mind of my first encounter with PERSPECTIVE. Drawing that is, not an angle on life - that came a bit later.
I was in a tea room in Muswell hill with my mother, at the age of about seven, and I was drawing something as usual. A man sitting on the next table asked me if I would like to know how perspective works. On a paper napkin he drew something very like the scene above and I suddenly understood a little of what Uccello became obsessed by. All my drawings for a short while were full of lines zooming towards vanishing points. I wish I had kept the napkin.

A slightly menacing building, hiding behind a factory.

A sad building next to the railway. I wondered who owned it and why it had been abandoned - perhaps in favour of one of the box-like pink villas dotted around the outskirts of the town.

                                                 

The highlight of the trip - a cup of tea in a time-forgotten café in the centre of town. A typical French version of a 'nice cup of tea': cup, containing almost hot water and 'yellow label' teabag on the saucer. At my request for milk, the café owner disappeared for ten minutes, returning with a gravy boat of milk, by which time the tea was cold. Not quite the National Trust experience I was lusting after, but it sort of did the job. 

    The café itself was one of those places that was put together in the early 70s and never touched again. The bowed Constable-type prints in their rustic wooden frames hung lopsidedly in the dull light from several suspended cartwheel lamps, and in the window sat a dining advertisment of a small table, candles and faded orange plastic chairs. Wonderful.

We did find the church, which was in need of more illumination in its central areas. The only church I've ever been in that smelt of toast rather than the usual musty damp stone.

And so, back to the car with hungry dogs and slightly disappointed Ezra - again we hadn't witnessed a TGV passing at 200 KM an hour. 

I'm sure there are some more scenic parts of Bram, but it was the semi-derelict buildings, each with their ragged collection of pigeons, that were the stars of the day.